Swatting politicians is bad
Timothy P. Carney
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It’s known as “swatting,” and you could fairly call it a form of terrorism. Some anonymous criminal calls in and falsely alleges some serious incident — a hostage situation, a pending suicide attempt, or domestic violence — that could trigger a raid by police or even a SWAT team.
I first learned of swatting around 2010 when prominent bloggers were getting swatted for their takes.
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The likely motive in these cases is to terrify and humiliate the target. It’s especially despicable because a very obvious risk is that people will die — the target, her family, the police, or bystanders. (An added cost, of course, is the wasting of police resources.)
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is the latest public official to be swatted, apparently for political reasons. “A man called the Augusta Regional Communication Center to report that he had broken into the state official’s house,” the Washington Examiner reported. Bellows, luckily, was not home at the time.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she was swatted on Christmas and that this was the eighth time.
You could read about both of these incidents in the above links in the Washington Examiner, but the New York Times, according to my search efforts, only mentioned the swatting of Greene, a pro-Trump Republican, as a footnote when reporting the swatting of Bellows, an anti-Trump Democrat.
That’s really too bad because both incidents deserve the strongest condemnation. Because swatting seems like prank-calling, some juvenile minds consider it funny. But it is a crime for a good reason, and when done for political reasons, it is basically terrorism.
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Bellows was swatted, in all likelihood, because she took the unprecedented, dangerous, and undemocratic step of unilaterally declaring that former President Donald Trump couldn’t run for president. Greene was swatted, in all likelihood, because she is an outspoken conspiracy theorist who is unbound by standards of decency or honesty.
We should all be bothered by the behavior of Greene and Bellows, but we should all be horrified by the actions of people who would endanger these women’s lives and terrorize them with hoax calls to the police.